Poverty makes a great photo-op

>> Villeray protesters tour their decaying neighbourhood, but their politicians won't take them seriously

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

Quartier Villeray, the collection of neighbourhoods located northeast of the Jean-Talon market, was once dotted with quarries where members of its largely Italian population worked. The quarries were eventually filled in and transformed into parks, and the Italians moved out of the neighbourhood to places like St-Léonard and Montreal North. More recently arrived immigrants then moved into the district, Haitians and Latin Americans, and with the jobs in the quarries now gone, the families in the neighbourhood began to look a little poorer.

Now, says Jacques Bordeleau of the Conseil communautaire solidarité Villeray, there's poverty entrenched here that didn't even exist a mere 15 years ago. Two of the district's elementary schools and one of its high schools have been ranked among the poorest on the island of Montreal, says Bordeleau. Just 15 years ago this would have been unthinkable... which made it an even more appropriate neighborhood to include on the Caravan of Poverty. The half-day tour of Villeray by 100 or so participants on two buses was one of a number of activities Monday in the province-wide day of protest against the welfare reforms proposed in Bill 186.

One of the most controversial elements of Bill 186 would see young welfare recipients and single mothers forced into still-undefined "paths to employment" programs, under threat of crippling, year-long cuts to their cheques.

Armed with a letter condemning Bill 186 from the Villeray CLSC, the Caravan visited such significant spots in the neighbourhood as the offices of federal Human Resources Minister Pierre Pettigrew, Parti Québécois MNA André Boisclair and Quebec Liberal MNA Christos Sirros to voice their discontent.

They were a peaceful bunch coming off the buses at Pettigrew's office, the first stop on the itinerary. The protesters were mostly women--some with little children in tow--and elderly people. They held signs with slogans of a particularly non-aggressive sort, the most pitiful perhaps being one that said, "It's not six-month programs we want! It's real jobs!"

Bizarrely, it turned out, this motley, shabbily-dressed gang somehow struck fear into the hearts of the two RCMP officers who had been stationed in advance at the office. Though Pettigrew had already indicated he would not be there, the office had promised that a press attaché would come down to receive the Caravan's printed demands. But, apparently advised by the RCMP, the attaché refused to show her face, remaining upstairs while the Caravan outside sang protest songs and read people's personal accounts of life on welfare. Four or five of Pettigrew's aides watched with small nervous smiles from closed upstairs windows. Finally, the RCMP officers brought the demands upstairs themselves.

Next stop: the office of Gouin MNA André Boisclair, also Quebec's minister of citizenship and immigration. He too was away from his office, but an attaché named Mme Godbout came outside and listened respectfully to the songs and testimonies. She said something polite at the end of it and they left.

Next to the previous two, Laurier-Dorion Liberal MNA Christos Sirros treated them warmly, as if they were guests on his talk show. He and his one or two aides looked compassionate as the testimonies were read, and then, when a very small child with a Pauvreté Zéro sign sat down on the front step of Sirros's office building, Sirros sat down beside her and put his arm around her. Delighted photographers swarmed around, clicking their cameras repeatedly, and Sirros basked in the glow. He escorted the child to her mother and then gave a stirring speech about how the Liberal party would get the economy back on track. It would all have been perfect except for one protester, who kept up a steady harangue on the Liberal government's past predilection for sending inspectors into welfare recipients' homes.

Then it was on to the Ligue des propriétaires' office, to protest the Ligue's work in lobbying the PQ to forcibly deduct rent from welfare cheques--another controversial provision of Bill 186. André Trépanier, a member of the Association des locataires de Villeray, told the crowd that the seizure provisions painted people on welfare as robbers and vandals, and pointed out that salaried workers were protected by law from any seizure if they made less than $516 a month. No one emerged from the Ligue's offices to talk to protesters.

Last stop was the local Quebec Employment Centre. A few more songs, a few more slogans, and then people got on the buses back to the community centre they'd left three hours before, still hopeful in mood, but a little wiser about paranoid, vainglorious and mostly invisible local politicians.